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Game Of The Year Contender: 'Spec Ops The Line'

The quest for the Game of the Year continues in this multi-part examination of some of the best video games of 2012.

Spec Ops: The Line was one of the most surprising games of 2012.

I knew nothing about it going in, and by all accounts it looked like nothing more than your average, ultra-violent shooter. In fact, for a good portion of the game it felt like a third-person cover-shooter version of Call of Duty.

It turned out to be more of a rebuttal of Call of Duty and other war-glorifying shooters than a participant in the genre.

“Ritual,” Shea writes, ”is the aspect centered around combat’s role as a social divider and status-giver.”

Ritual gives us things like the glorified warrior class—the brave knights or super-soldiers—and sets the stage for the glorification of war itself.

However unpleasant it may be, historically war has also been perceived as noble and our warriors as the most noble members of society.

This plays out in video games and fiction and comic books and movies, where we play as near-invincible soldiers, ninjas, or barbarians or read about super heroes or powerful wizards, or watch Chuck Norris lay bearded waste to wave upon wave of bogies.

“Survival,” Shea continues, ”is the aspect centered around war as an unpleasant-but-necessary duty.”

However, these two “forms” of warfare do not exist in isolation of one another; rather, Shea argues, they exist on a sort of sliding scale.

“Ritual is the “empowering” end of the scale,” he writes, “where warriors boast of their strength and their ability and establish themselves at the top of the social hierarchy. Survival is the “moral” end of the scale, where war is unpleasant, grim, and necessary, but where soldiers are treated as heroes for doing their duty in the face of unavoidable odds. Most wars are not “truly ritual” or “truly survival”, but somewhere along the scale.”

Most video games place us in the role of the ritualistic warrior. Whether we’re Max Payne or Batman, we can shrug off the myriad bullets hurled our way and even death is temporary. In fiction, if a hero dies he almost certainly won’t come back (though there are exceptions to this.) Even the Ned Starks of the world, however bravely they fought in the past, can lose their heads.

But in video games we rarely face true death; we play as a warrior class without limits. Perhaps this is inevitable given the medium. Even “permadeath” games just require you to start over. Indeed, permadeath makes getting to know your characters almost impossible, thereby taking out any emotional oomph you might find in fiction.

The most interesting thing about Spec Ops: The Line is that it presents you with a lead protagonist who is the very epitome of the super soldier. Captain Martin Walker is a one-man army (or the leader of a three-man army, anyways) whose ability to carve through countless foes is unmatched in any action movie. As the arbiter of death and power, Walker is the perfect icon of the Ritualistic hero.

And yet, at the same time we’re presented with a story of war that is so bleak, so psychologically damaging, and so horrific that we begin to realize as the game progresses that maybe, just maybe, we’re not a hero at all.

Few games challenge our gamer presumptions about violence and complicity and fewer still challenge the archetypes that rule the video game genre. Spec Ops: The Line is by no means a perfect game, but it provides a welcome self-awareness that is too often absent in the medium.

As with so many story-driven games, however, The Line is not a game with a tremendous amount of replay value. Combat is decent but not particularly innovative, and the linearity of the game makes it less appealing on second playthroughs.

For all the impact of its first go-round, the game hasn’t sucked me back in the way others—such as XCOM: Enemy Unknown—have, even though its storytelling stands out above the crowd.

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I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with you here. Spec-Ops: The Line’s storytelling was very hamfisted. It desperately shocks the player with reoccurring motifs as a false display of poignancy. The game isn’t very mature, nor was any of its themes profound. It had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, because the message of the story is shoved down the player’s throat. Something which I found to be pathetically manipulative.

Spec Ops was a pretty good surprise. There were so many good lines, and interesting unreliable narrator things that I really enjoy. But the gameplay itself wasn’t that fun for me, though I did enjoy the last couple levels.

Erik, I picked up Spec Ops off Steam during the holidays, only because of what you had written about it in the past.

Got to say, I found it quite interesting and fun to play. I’m not much of a single player experience guy, but I found myself drawn in to this one.

And it wasn’t so much because of the story, or the gameplay itself. Was more about the gritty nature of the game in its entirety, and some of the smaller things about the game (like running out of ammo constantly, not being able to do everything with one weapon, etc.).

Game of the Year material? Not so sure about that, but it was enjoyable, especially for the $12 price tag.

Spec Ops was really a pleasant surprise (ok, actually it wasn’t very pleasant, but that was kind of the point). Beside of the story and the rather interesting visuals, I especially liked how it handled choices. I admit there weren’t many and most of them had rather limited consequences, but I really liked how there was no real good or evil, no right an wrong (similar to the Witcher 2, a game that also is a IMO great example for a good choice system). And what I found even better, the choices were integrated in the gameplay. Not transparent presented to you to chose on dialogue but look, listen and act. This was going so far, that in some situation all possible choices weren’t even apparent. While it seemed that the player had to choose between action A and B, was in reality a choice between action A, B, C and D. All activated by different actions. I was more than surprised to stumble over such a concept in a game that was basically a shooter.

I hope in the future we see more games with interesting and complex choice system like in Witcher 2 or Spec Ops: The Line. And not the standard boring “good/bad moral” choice systems, where the choices not even totally transparent but even colorcoded for your convenience.

I’ve always agreed with the general assessment of The Line, but my biggest takeaway was: This is how Uncharted should be. Spec Ops did everything Uncharted games did, but so much better. The enemies weren’t unstoppable bullet sponges and I knew where I was getting shot. Plus, it was cinematic, without having to constantly interrupt me with collapsing platforms and jumps that were just too short. Naughty Dog could really learn a thing or two.